Trafficticket.com: Being pulled over in the internet age

I recently had reason to recall the 2001 documentary “Startup.com,” which is about two Clinton-era entrepreneurs and their hopefully named internet company, “govWorks.” The idea of “govWorks” was to set up a way to pay parking and traffic tickets online, thereby streamlining municipal bureaucracies and giving people faith that, if the government could do this, it might work in other ways too.

Now I’d like to say that my thinking of this movie came out of my longstanding interest in American cinema. But in all honesty it had more to do with the ticket I received for being pulled over and not having all my paperwork.

At the time of the incident, or as I prefer to call it, “alleged incident,” my thoughts didn’t jump right to “Startup.com.” As the officer instructed me how to pay the ticket online, I was thinking, “Online or in person that’s still a lot of money!”

Only later did it occur to me that the far-reaching vision of Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman, whose company in fact ended up going bust in “Startup.com,” had eventually been realized, and I had in some small way been there to see it happen. What had seemed a revolutionary idea in 1998 when Tuzman discovered a two-year-old unpaid parking ticket in his closet was now standard operating procedure on the back roads of central New Jersey!

Yet – and perhaps my mind was still dwelling on the dollar amount of the ticket – I couldn’t help but think that more remained to be done. After all, if the government of the county I was driving through was operating in an increasingly paperless fashion, why couldn’t I do the same? Why did I need a paper showing my car was registered to me since the officer had just used my license to look up this fact on a database?

Or if this documentation continues to be necessary, here’s a challenge for the next generation of entrepreneurs: a database that would not just confirm the existence of a missing registration but provide information about its whereabouts.

“When you get home,” the officer would say while handing me my next astronomical ticket, “look in the upstairs filing cabinet behind all the camp forms.”